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Should people be allowed to drink in Toronto parks?

Recent attention to widespread drinking in Trinity Bellwoods Park has reopened the debate on whether people should be able to enjoy a drink in public.

You can enjoy the sun, sky and greenery at Trinity Bellwoods Park, but open a bottle of wine and you may be in some trouble. Some core dwellers wonder if that makes sense. (CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR)

You can do it in Paris, London, Berlin and even Montreal, but here in stodgy old Toronto, consuming alcohol in public is an offence, albeit one that often gets a blind eye.

On paper, citizens of Hogtown can drink on their porch or balcony. They can drink on a patio. But they can’t drink in a park or on the beach.

As the ranks of downtown condo dwellers swell, and Toronto becomes an increasingly urbanized city where only the lucky few have backyards, there’s a growing sentiment that the simple act of sipping a glass of wine or swigging a beer in public shouldn’t be a criminal offence.

“If I want to drink outside, I can go on my rooftop,” said Daniel Barna, a 30-year-old freelance writer who recently moved into a downtown condo. “But you have to book it four weeks in advance and leave a $200 deposit. I’d rather just go to Trinity Bellwoods. That’s why I moved here in the first place.”

Poll

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Barna’s been partaking in this indulgence for five years, and now it’s not uncommon to see hundreds gathered on sunny afternoons.

“It’s a very friendly environment,” said Barna. “You’re lying down in the grass with your shoes off while drinking cheap wine or cheap beer and running into people you know.”

While there won’t be any additional resources devoted to the initiative, officers are stepping up their patrols of parks and will be handing out $125 tickets to those found with an open alcoholic beverage.

At a
community meeting
held Thursday night by Councillor Mike Layton (Ward 19 Trinity-Spadina), residents complained that they don’t feel welcome in the park anymore. The late-night noise was keeping them up.

There’s a thick web of overlapping laws at the municipal, provincial and federal level that govern drinking in public. Critics say it’s time to drop the ban on open alcohol because it’s not the act of drinking that people object to. It’s the rowdy behaviour, public drunkenness and noisy disturbances that give drinking in public a bad name.

Being intoxicated in a public place is a provincial offence with a $65 fine. Causing a disturbance by being drunk is a federal criminal offence with a maximum penalty of six months in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Surely laws against drunkenness are enough to discourage bad behaviour, said Barna. Dropping the open alcohol ban would let those who drink responsibly do so openly.

“It’s the age-old question in Canada: why do you have these laws against public drinking if they’re not enforced?” asked Barna, who says it’s extremely rare to see police stop anyone drinking at Trinity Bellwoods.

This tolerance doesn’t seem to apply to other parts of the city. Police
regularly patrol parks
in North York and Scarborough, where residents complain there’s drinking and drug use. They don’t hesitate to hand out tickets.

Barna says Trinity Bellwoods is a flagship for how public drinking could work in Toronto and hopes the good example will spread.

“If people around the city see this, then maybe widespread public drinking will occur,” he said. “If someone gets ticketed or arrested, they’ll be like, ‘Why in certain parks in the city do the cops not care, but in my neighbourhood they do?’”

Ontario’s Attorney General John Gerretsen has no plans to revisit open alcohol laws.

“The Liquor Licence Act strikes a balance between the public interest and individual choice, while encouraging the socially responsible consumption of beverage alcohol,” said a ministry spokesperson.

The ban on open alcohol didn’t come out of nowhere. The province has a long history of restrictive liquor laws. Fred Newman, 70, manages the Imperial Pub on Dundas Square, which was opened by his father in 1944. He now works alongside his son Ricky and recollects how they’ve had to adapt the bar every time a new law came in.

Until the early ’70s, they had to keep men and ladies with escorts in separate rooms with separate entrances.

“No one was allowed to cross over — ever,” he said.

As a beverage room that sold draught beer, The Imperial had to close at 6:30 p.m. to let people go home for dinner, later reopening at 8 p.m.

The bars down the street were classified as taverns because they only served bottled beer and were permitted to stay open all evening.

“They had some very strange rules,” said Newman.

Bartenders were required to pour beer into government-issue glasses and fill them up to a white “tide line,” he said, so that the government could track how much beer they were buying and selling. But the glasses kept changing sizes.

“First they were 6 ounces, then 8 ounces and 10 ounces. Then they brought it back down to 8 ounces,” he said.

“When I was a youngster, you couldn’t buy a bottle of liquor at the liquor store with out filling out a form and signing it,” he said.

According to the LCBO, the drinking age in Ontario was dropped to 18 in 1971 and then increased to 19 in 1978.

“But I think the age is too low,” said Newman. “Too many kids are getting killed on the roads.”

It’s all linked to an unhealthy relationship to alcohol, says Evanna Folkenfolk, a 27-year-old English teacher and writer from Toronto who now lives in Berlin. With no ban on drinking in public and no last call, alcohol is less stigmatized in Germany, she says, and there’s less binge drinking and obvious alcohol abuse.

“Alcohol has the potential to be really dangerous but when it’s part of society in a certain way, those dangers are minimized,” she said by telephone from Berlin. “People in Toronto have this hysterical attitude to alcohol despite its utter prevalence.”

Folkenfolk describes how people gather on the Admiral Bridge in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin, playing music and drinking while the sun goes down. It’s a low-key event. But even so, the police arrive each time at 11 p.m. sharp and politely ask the revellers to move on.

The drinkers keep drinking, the residents can get some sleep and the cops don’t have any paperwork to fill out.

An example Toronto could
learn from?

Correction - July 12, 2013:
This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said the drinking age was 21 for many years, until it went down to 18 in t
he 1960s.

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